About

Build a Sustainable, Profitable, Audience-Driven Business.

But that’s a long story (you can scroll down to read the extended version).

The short version is I spent 9,000 hours practicing a skill, got to the point where I was working with large clients, charging five-figure rates, and selling physical products with my own designs and shipping out orders every single day.

As well as this was going, the vast majority of my audience wanted to learn how to do what I did!

I launched a course teaching people how to make a living as a hand lettering artist. It made six figures in the first three days.

Here’s What I’ve Been Working On Recently

I started a daily show, seanwes tv, where I share new videos with fiery inspiration on creativity and business 7 days a week. It’s currently on pause while I work on other projects, but you can view the archive.

Every Wednesdays, I publish a new episode of the seanwes podcast on creativity and business.

A Tale of Too Many Passions

Narrowing my focus led to the greatest increase in exposure I’d ever experienced.

Now that I’ve learned firsthand what works, I’m on a mission to teach as many people as possible how to find what they love to do and make a living from it.

I have a lot of passions. Maybe you can relate. You’re good at a lot of things, you have many skills and a plethora of interests.

So did I.

I’ve done everything from fixing and reselling PDAs on eBay as a 12-year-old, to running a profitable computer repair business with residential and commercial clients and contracts in my later teens, to running a partnership web firm, and even playing piano and guitar full time in a band.

I was good at all of it too. Not just good, but I was obsessed with being the best at whatever I did.

But there was a problem.

I wasn’t getting anywhere. My exposure wasn’t increasing, my audience wasn’t growing, and I wasn’t getting recognition for any of my work. I was working extremely hard and putting in long hours and it felt like I was just spinning my wheels.

Curate What You Share

Remember earlier when I told you I was doing logo design, user interface, animation, videography, illustration, icon design, and more?

I was still doing that. Only this time, I decided to change things.

I decided to only share hand lettering.

Even though I was still doing all kinds of work for clients and my day job, I decided to only share hand lettering on my online portfolios and social media accounts.

This is where I saw the greatest inflection point of my career in terms of exposure.

I call this curating what you share. By curate I mean: selectively project a single, focused thing.

They’re Going to Put You in a Box

Why did this work?

Suddenly, people “got” what I was about. When you project a myriad of random things, people cannot process you.

The reality is that people put other people in boxes. It’s nothing personal, it’s simply that we’re cognitively limited to 150 close relationships. Beyond that, we’re unable to internalize the complexities of every unique individual.

In a world of social media noise and information overload, people are forced to simply put you in a box.

You cannot do anything about the fact that people will put you in box. What you can do is define the box they’re already going to put you in.

You pick one thing and you selectively project that single, focused thing.

Watch what happens when you do this…

Teach What You Know

Around this time, I started to get a lot of inquiries from people asking how to get started with hand lettering. At first, I answered them. One by one, I replied to every single person’s questions and shared tips I had picked up.

Eventually, 5 people were emailing me a day. I decided instead of personally answering emails every day, I would make a guide.

I wrote and put up a 10-step introductory lettering guide on my website. This was before I knew anything about email lists or lead magnets. I just put it on my site as a page viewable by anyone.

Within a year, a staggering 200,000 people had read that guide.

There was clearly an interest here and room to go deeper.

I had a lot to teach. By this point in the story, I’d already pivoted to doing hand lettering full time. I was working with clients, charging 5-figure rates, and reinvesting that money into my own physical products.

But even though I was making incredible money with clients and shipping out physical products every single day, I was ignoring the elephant in the room: people who wanted to learn how to do what I did.

Use Your Unique Advantage

The guide was such a massive hit, I knew I needed to produce a course to go in depth.

I spent the next six month working 18 hours a day on client work. I worked, and worked, and worked, and saved up enough money to quit client work and live off of savings for six months.

See, I had a unique advantage. Yes, I’d spent 9,000 hours practicing hand lettering, but I also came from a very unique perspective.

Where as most artists were teaching people how to draw letters, my background was in business. I knew how to work with clients, price with confidence, and write design and licensing contracts. I was doing this full time.

That’s when it hit me: I would teach people how to make a living as a hand lettering artist.

We’ve had people write us and say they’ve been able to quit their day job, charge more with clients, start their product business, and even some who have moved across the world as a result of what they learned in the seanwes podcast.

“It’s life-changing,” we often hear.

Many of those life-changing conversations were happening in email. People would write in to thank us for the show and we’d end up having incredible conversations over email.

But no one else was able to benefit from these conversations!

I knew we needed a centralized place to share these discussions. I knew we needed to create a place where podcast listeners across the globe of like mind could come together.

The Community

You’ve never experienced a more abundant mindset than the one shared by the members of the Community.

Every hour of the day, every timezone across the world, there are people online who are eager to provide quality feedback.

Our custom-built chat system makes for a Community experience unlike any you’ve ever seen.

With our mobile app, you can listen to live streams and access the chat on the go at any time.

But it wasn’t always like this!

The Community began in 2013 as a forum. It was simply a place where listeners could connect with each other and go in depth on the topics we discussed in the podcast.

I knew I wanted the quality of conversation to stay high, so I put a price on membership. Since then, the Community has remained a paid subscription.

Unlike other membership sites, I never discount the price or offer free or $1 trials. As a result, the quality of people inside the Community is unmatched. Only the serious are here. It has never been about numbers for me, but about the depth of engagement.

In the early days, we figured we might as well stream the show live to the Community members as a perk of their membership.

Of course, if people were listening live, they’d probably want a way to chat with each other.

We couldn’t have predicted the impact of the chat.

At the time, we were using a basic chat plugin. It worked alright until it didn’t. Because it was poorly built and not optimized for scale, it would slow the site to a crawl and eventually crash if too many people were on it at once.

I decided to hire one of the members to build a bespoke chat system just for the Community.

$50,000 and half a year later, we have what I believe to be one of the most incredible chat systems for a community ever built.

We’re now nearing our second year of development on this chat system and I ended up inviting the developer to join the seanwes team full time.

Podcast Network

The company, seanwes (origin story), was originally representing only myself. I realize though, after I’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over years of 18-hour days building this infrastructure, that what I’d built was able to do much more than just serve my own projects.

I opened up the platform to a select group of close friends and Community members and we now have a number of podcasts on the seanwes network.

All podcasts on the seanwes network are 100% sponsor-free and supported by the Community.

Meetups & Conference

In 2015, we hosted a number of seanwes meetups in major cities like New York City, Dallas, and San Francisco.

Dozens if not hundreds of people in total came out to the meetups. Many were Community members and others were podcast listeners.

These meetups were such a success, we decided to take things to the next level in 2016 with the inaugural seanwes conference in Austin, Texas.